


I think that things will change but I'm losing my belief

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [35]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-typical ambiguity about whether the Shelbys can actually see ghosts, Depression, Dissociation, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Gen, Hallucinations, Insomnia, Nightmares, Parentification, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Series, Season 1, Sleep Deprivation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Talking To Dead People, This fic is rated for part 1 the rest should be a bit tamer, season 4, season 5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:47:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24083068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Tommy and Polly through the ages. Or how to destroy your relationship with your aunt in four easy steps.
Relationships: Polly Gray & Tommy Shelby
Series: Prompted Works [35]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1366669
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40
Collections: Peaky Blinders Prompt Fest - Spring 2020





	1. Pre-Series

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [PBPromptFestSpring2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/PBPromptFestSpring2020) collection. 



> Title from "Chains" by Avi Kaplan.
> 
> In this first part Polly is 17 and Tommy is almost 11. I fiddled with everyone else’s ages a little because I’m assuming some of them have had birthdays since their mother died.

Mornings at Watery Lane were always barely contained chaos. People were always stumbling around half asleep—or still drunk in Arthur Sr.’s worthless case—running into each other and dropping things. Little Ada was three and while she could sort of feed herself, she always ended up making quite a mess, which John copied because he thought it was funny.

“That’s enough, John,” Polly said grabbing the little boy’s spoon when she saw him winding up to hurl a spoonful of oatmeal into Arthur Jr.’s half-asleep face. “You were so proud to turn five, why don’t you act like it?”

Johnny pouted and Polly held back a sigh. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Tom would let me,” Johnny argued with all the wisdom of small children.

“We both know he wouldn’t,” Polly said. “Eat your breakfast.”

John’s face fell but at least he gave up on splattering his breakfast all over his twelve-year-old brother’s face for the time being.

Polly sunk down into her chair and tried to enjoy some of her breakfast before the next crisis broke out. Curse Tommy for leaving her alone with these hellions. He knew they listened to her about as well as they listened to their father most days. It didn’t help that she didn’t know how to talk to them. At least her brother wasn’t around his morning; his presence always made everything worse.

“Do you know where Tom is?” she asked Arthur Jr., who had been absentmindedly stirring his oatmeal, eyes half closed, the hand propping up his chin slowly slipping until he was perilously close to face-planting into his breakfast. “Arthur,” she said more sharply and he jumped. John and Ada cackled with laughter.

“Yeah?” Arthur asked, squinting muzzily at her.

“Where’s Tommy?” she repeated.

“I dunno,” he shrugged and shot a glare at Johnny and Ada who were still giggling. “Went to go check something out, I guess.”

Well, that didn’t answer any of her questions. Polly tried to contain her frustration. She and Dad needed to go over the odds for the weekend races tomorrow. Every moment she spent—poorly—containing her nephews and niece was a moment wasted. Tommy was usually good about always being around to take care of the kids. It was frustrating that he’d wandered off on a day when important things needed to happen.

“Polly,” a tremulous voice said from the doorway leading into the betting shop. She looked up to see that Tommy had appeared as if he had been summoned.

Something about him made Polly pause, though. He didn’t look right. His face was pale as paste and his lips were pressed together into a thin line. There were odd, dark stains on the knees of his pants and he was holding his hands behind his back in a way that looked very suspicious. His eyes were the size of dinner plates. He looked young in a way Polly hadn’t seen him since he’d stood on the side of the Cut eight months ago watching while Dad, Charlie and some of the boys hauled his mother’s drowned body out of the water. It was a bit disconcerting to see. Tommy was the most serious and mature child Polly had ever met; it was strange to remember that he wasn’t even eleven for another week and a half.

“Pol, can I talk to you for a minute?” Tommy asked. He sounded like he was trying to stay calm but couldn’t quite contain the tremor in his voice. “In the betting shop?”

Polly almost asked him if it could wait until after breakfast, but he wasn’t acting right. Tommy wasn’t prone to fits of excitement like Arthur was; whatever he wanted to talk about was important. She got up. “Arthur, can you watch Johnny and Ada for a minute?”

“Sure,” Arthur said around a huge yawn, already half asleep again. Polly tried to ignore the gleam in Johnny’s eye. They’d probably be cleaning oatmeal off the ceiling because of this.

She tried to put that out of her head as she followed Tommy into the betting shop. The shop looked in order but there was an odd coppery smell in the air. The scent was not necessarily unfamiliar but still foreign enough to the betting shop that Polly couldn’t place it.

“What did you want to talk about?” she asked Tom. “Johnny’s about to plaster Arthur and the whole kitchen in oatmeal.”

Tommy just started off across the betting shop without a word so Polly had no choice but to follow him. “Tom—”

Tommy reached the door to Dad’s office and stopped. Polly watched him take a deep breath like he was bracing himself and then reach out to open the door. For the first time Polly noticed that there was blood on his hands. Her own blood ran cold.

Tommy twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open. Immediately the coppery scent got more pronounced and Polly recognized it. It was the smell of death. The smell of blood.

Her heart in her mouth, she stepped into the office. Her father was slumped across his desk and half their ledgers, his brains blown out against the opposite wall, his revolver clutched loosely in his hand.

“He shot himself,” Tommy said hollowly. She realized the stains on his pants were blood too. He must have tried to shake his grandad awake. “He shot himself in the head in his office. While we were all asleep upstairs.”

Polly’s father had not been right since his daughter-in-law had drowned herself. Perhaps he hadn’t been right before that, but Polly hadn’t really noticed until then. He’d started drinking, which was something he’d never been much for before, and he hadn’t been sleeping. She’d also caught him talking to people who weren’t there a few times. That was worrying. While Polly’s sister-in-law had obviously been mad towards the end, the Shelbys had a reputation for family members who could communicate with spirits. Dad had always maintained that was bullshit, which was why him beginning to talk to things only he could see had scared her. She’d worried he was going the same way as Tommy’s mother had.

But now was not the time to worry about those kinds of things, Polly tried to think straight. She needed to act and she needed to act now. Her first rational thought was relief that her brother was still out drowning himself in booze and trouble. Everything would be far worse with him around to muck it up.

“We need to call some of the boys,” she said to Tommy. “They can help us move him and clean things up.” That would also give her a chance to exert some control over the Peaky Blinders before her brother even knew power was changing hands. She knew she’d never be able to wrestle power away from him outright, but the boys all trusted her leadership more; if she was careful she could install her brother as a figurehead and he’d never be any wiser.

“Okay,” Tommy said. He sounded a little faint and desperately thankful she was telling him what to do.

“We should probably send Arthur, John and Ada to Charlie’s yard for the day too,” she said. “We won’t tell them what’s happened just yet. I don’t want them to see this. We’ll tell them once things have been cleaned up a bit.”

“Okay,” Tommy repeated.

Polly gave his shoulder a little squeeze. “I’ll be right back,” she said and fled from the scene of the carnage to contact the boys and bundle the kids off to Charlie’s yard.

When she returned a while later with Scudboat and a few more of the boys, Tommy was sitting on the floor in the office doorway arms wrapped around himself like he’d just collapsed where she’d left him. Scudboat scooped him up and set him down in front of the big blackboard a safe distance away. He allowed it with a vacant expression on his face, but by the time they’d moved the body out of the office he’d come back to himself enough to help with the cleaning. Later he helped Polly copy down the numbers from the ruined ledgers into new ledgers.

It wasn’t until years later when they were sheltering in Small Heath from the Italians and Polly noticed how careful Tommy was to keep his son away from all the violence that she thought to wonder if maybe Tommy should have been sent to Charlie’s yard with his siblings that day.


	2. Post-WWI Pre-s1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for how long it took me to finish this.
> 
> I originally planned for this to be set in s1, but that didn't end up happening. For some reason post-WWI fics feel more pre-s1 than pre-series so that's how I labeled it. **shrugs**

As a child Tommy’s role in the family had always been decidedly domestic—womanly, Arthur Sr. had always said with a sniff of distain. As a child and later as a teenager Tommy had never had much interest in the family business, instead focusing on caring for his siblings. In fact, he’d had a reputation for hating the methods they used to fix the races. By the time he hit his teens he’d stopped saying anything, but he could still be found lurking in the stables after races apologizing to the horses because he hated seeing them drugged.

Things had changed the winter of 1908 when Michael and Anna were stolen. Their theft was sudden and horrible and it took Polly months to recover. When she managed to drag herself back into reality in the spring, Tommy had taken over running the Peaky Blinders. Granted he’d expanded the business into protection, which was something Polly had been avoiding—she hadn’t wanted them to be beholden to others like that—and their coffers were vastly depleted—when she’d asked Tommy had cursed about Arthur Sr. and she’d used her imagination. However, while she got the impression that things had been hairy for a few months, Tommy had everything well in hand.

If she was completely honest with herself, that was really got her back into the game. She had spent her whole life fighting for her power in the Peaky Blinders and she was not about to hand that power over to her nephew who hadn’t even been interested in running the gang six months before.

Much to her admitted surprise, Tommy didn’t really seem to have a problem with letting her take some power back. However, he never quite backed off into his previous role. After that point they were co-leaders. Whenever there was a decision that needed to be made, they sat down and made it together. It was actually kind of nice to have someone to share the workload with.

Then Greta died and the war came and Tommy enlisted like an idiot and Arthur and John followed along like lost puppies. Polly and Ada spent the whole war waiting for a letter saying that one of them had died, but somehow, miraculously, no one died. Or at least they didn’t appear to, though when the war was over she began to realize that wasn’t quite true.

A few weeks after the boys got back, Polly was awoken in the middle of the night by Arthur screaming. He sounded a bit like he was being murdered so her first thought was that there was someone in the house. She’d rushed up the stairs, gun in hand, but Arthur was alone in his room, apparently having a nightmare of some sort. This was a bit unexpected because Arthur had never been a troubled sleeper before, but she wasn’t about to leave him to his misery.

There were shoes on the stairs behind her just before she entered the room. “Pol, wait!”

She whirled around in time to see Tommy reach the landing. He had obviously been outside and was disheveled in just the trousers and shirt she was fairly sure he’d been wearing for days. At least he had his overcoat on this time though his cap was nowhere to be seen.

This was the first time she’d heard him speak in days.

All three boys were different but Tommy was the most so. There was a vagueness to him these days, like he often wasn’t quite present. He had a new habit of just staring into the middle distance and you could tell he wasn’t aware of anything that was going on around him. He’d taken to wandering at night as well and Polly was fairly sure he wasn’t sleeping, she knew for certain that he wasn’t eating. She hadn’t heard him leave tonight and that worried her.

“I’ll handle this, Polly,” Tommy said. “Ada, go sit with Finn. Everything’s fine.” Polly hadn’t even noticed Ada was awake, but Tommy obviously had. His gaze was sharp and alive. It was the first time since the boys had returned from France that he seemed like himself.

Ada scurried away and Tommy crossed to the bedroom. “Tommy, what’s—” Polly began, but Tommy cut her off.

“It’s fine, Pol. Go back to bed; I’ll handle this.”

“Tom—” Polly tried again, but Tommy entered Arthur’s room and closed the door sharply in her face.

It wasn’t like it was unusual for her to be closed out of these kinds of issues. Tommy had always had a more active role in the wellbeing of his siblings than she did, it was just that he’d been a ghost for weeks and she was worried.

Instead of going back to bed, she climbed the next flight of stairs to Tommy’s bedroom and let herself inside. Despite its occupant being home now, the little room somehow felt just a museum-like as it had when Tommy had been away. It wasn’t that it was unchanged, though, because it wasn’t. The bed’s blankets were rumpled and the bag Tommy had brought back from France lay still mostly packed in one corner, save for his shaving kit which was spread haphazardly before the mirror. A half-finished bottle of whiskey and a glass sat on the bedside table along with an ashtray full of the blackened corpses of several packages of cigarettes. Something about the forlorn disorder of it all made Polly feel like she was in a tomb.

She sat down on the bed, put her gun on the bedside table and lit a cigarette of her own while she waited. Eventually the sounds from downstairs quieted and the house was once again silent. Gray pre-dawn light was beginning to seep into the room before Polly heard shoes on the steps. She stubbed her most recent cigarette out in the overfilled ashtray—she made a mental note to empty that; Tommy obviously wasn’t capable of doing so himself—just before the door opened.

Tommy stepped inside and froze at the sight of her. “I thought you went to bed.”

“Since when have I ever taken orders from you?” she asked.

Tommy didn’t respond. Instead he crossed the room. At first Polly thought he was coming to her, but then he snatched the bottle of whiskey and glass off the end side table and moved away again. His hands were visibly unsteady when he poured a shot and threw it back, but he seemed to be operating under the assumption that if he ignored it she would too.

“You going to offer me any?” she asked.

The look Tommy gave her was a bit blindsided. He looked around the room. Obviously, there were no other glasses. Polly couldn’t tell if he had legitimately forgotten he only had one glass, but the odds that was the case were higher than she would have liked.

“How’s Arthur?” she asked as he was filling another glass. If he was going to keep downing shots like this she needed to get the requisite information out of him before he completely lost coherence.

“He’s fine,” Tommy said, downing the second shot. He was pacing, though he didn’t seem quite aware of it. “Nightmare. He’s fine.”

“I thought he was being murdered,” she said, nodding to the gun on the bedside table.

“It was a bad nightmare.”

“That happen often?”

Tommy shrugged and poured another glass of whiskey, this one a bit bigger.

“You should slow down,” Polly said. “Your stomach’s empty.”

Tommy glared at her and downed the glass anyway, though he didn’t immediately refill it, which Polly figured was a win.

“Where were you tonight?” Polly asked. “I didn’t hear you leave.”

Tommy blinked blankly. Given how he’d been recently, she wouldn’t be surprised if he legitimately didn’t remember where he’d been tonight. She needed to be more careful about keeping him inside at night. She didn’t want him to be wandering around so out of it that he accidentally fell into the Cut and drowned.

“You should get some sleep,” she said, getting up and stepping away from the bed in the hopes that would entice him into lying down. “It’ll be morning soon.”

Tommy just stared at her. He was starting to look vague again, though this time it seemed more exhausted than anything else. He was very pale and thin and there were dark circles under his eyes. Tommy was crumbling like an old house and it was one of the scariest things she’d ever seen.

“Tom,” she said quietly. “Just lie down for a couple hours.”

For a moment she didn’t think he was going to listen, but then he stepped towards the bed. He swayed a bit on his feet, either from the alcohol or just shear exhaustion, maybe both. Polly grabbed his elbow because she thought he was going to fall. Thankfully, he let her take the bottle of whiskey and glass before collapsing boneless onto the bed.

Polly set the whiskey bottle and glass down while she dug an extra blanket out of a drawer and tossed it over him to avoid trying to work the blankets currently on the bed out from under him. Then she settled down on the edge of the bed. He shifted a little, but didn’t comment or get up.

“Have you heard about how Finn accidentally dumped Ada in the Cut this spring?” she asked. He hummed vaguely but didn’t seem to object to hearing the tale. “Well, it’s quite the story, actually,” she said. “Ada and Finn were—”

She stayed until dawn had truly come and she was sure he had fallen asleep, then she gathered the bottle and glass again—there had been enough alcohol in this room—and left. At this point there was no point in going back to bed so she dressed and headed downstairs to wait for the paper.

Arthur slept until well into the afternoon, but Tommy was up again within two hours. Polly was just starting breakfast when he wandered downstairs like a ghost. He was fully dressed this time but the vagueness was back.

When she asked him how he’d slept, he didn’t respond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully part three will be faster. I'm tentatively planning for the last two parts to be in Tommy's POV but who knows, I guess.


	3. 4x01

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I am twenty-three years old. I’ve been posting fanfiction on the internet since I was sixteen. That entire time I’ve been writing multi-chapter fics saying “the next chapter will be faster” and then not following through. I really should know better than to say such things at this point.
> 
> Note on layout of the Watery Lane house: Since the betting shop appears to be longer than the house itself is, I’m operating under the assumption that the Shelbys also own the neighboring house and knocked down some first-floor walls to make the betting shop. I’m saying this house is the one John and Esme live in during s1 and Arthur and Linda live in during s4. I’m headcanoning that the family bought this neighboring house and expanded the betting shop after John married Martha, perhaps using that marriage as an excuse for the expansion. I’d considered whether they would have bought the house when Polly married Michael’s father, but decided they probably wouldn’t have had the money at the time.

Tommy Shelby was a cynical man, in fact it had become something of point of pride in recent years. It was hard to maintain any sense of optimism or hope for the future when you’d been at the fucking Somme.

It turned out he had maintained some sense of optimism, however, because he honestly hadn’t expected the reaction he got from Pol when he finally succeeded in getting the family out of prison. He’d spent the whole time they’d been in prison trying to make sure they weren’t killed before he could figure out how to get them out, only to be blindsided by how much Polly hated him afterwards. He really should have known that Polly wouldn’t understand that he hadn’t sold her and the others out and that he’d done everything in his power to get them out, but he’d still somehow missed it and that was the worst part of the whole thing.

He’d given up on the family ever being back together the way it had been when Christmas cards with black handprints in them came in the mail. Twenty-four hours later John was dead and the whole family was back in Small Heath.

Tommy shifted and rolled his shoulders. He was sitting on the foot of his old bed in his old room, chain smoking and watching Charlie sleep. It was past midnight. This was the first time since he’d found the handprint card that he’d allowed himself to just sit. He already knew he wasn’t going to sleep tonight but it was nice to rest a little before planning John’s funeral and the necessary revenge in the morning. What he really needed was a drink, but Finn was evidently keeping the alcohol someplace new. He was sure that if he asked Finn, the kid would claim that there wasn’t alcohol in the house at all, but Tommy knew that wasn’t true—he, Arthur and John had been pulling mugs of ale and glasses whiskey and rum out of Finn’s hands for years. Still, he wasn’t in the mood to look for it.

There was a noise from downstairs and Tommy tensed. It sounded like someone was banging around. Immediately he thought of the Italians who had killed John. He had checked the locks on all the doors and windows of the Watery Lane house and the house next door which had been John’s house with Martha and then Esme. At least here they knew where all the keys for the two houses were, which was more than they could say for Polly’s house where none of the keys were accounted for. Still, just because the doors were locked didn’t mean someone couldn’t have gotten in. Doors in Small Heath were thin and flimsy. They’d had numerous break-ins during the years they’d lived here.

He lifted himself off the bed, careful not to wake Charlie and felt for his gun. He put out his cigarette and let himself silently out of the room. Living in Arrow House hadn’t dulled his memory of this place; he still knew exactly where to step to keep the floors from creaking. He made his way carefully down the steep steps. He was halfway down when whoever was downstairs tripped over something and started cursing. Tommy drew his gun and moved down the rest of the steps with little care for what noise he was making. He rounded the corner into the kitchen, gun raised.

It was only Polly.

They stared at each other across the dark room, neither of them blinking. It took Tommy a beat too long to remember to lower the gun. Somehow putting the thing away made the whole situation even more awkward. He and Polly hadn’t spoken since she’d decreed that she would never forgive him the day after being freed from prison. That had been months ago, and now they were crammed together in the same house.

“I thought you were an intruder,” Tommy finally said, figuring one of them had to make the first move.

“I’m just looking for the fucking booze,” Polly snapped. “Finn’s moved everything around.”

But he’d left all the bedrooms the same. Tommy wished he hadn’t. Being back in this house would have been a hell of a lot easier if his bedroom wasn’t exactly the same tomb-like room he’d struggled to sleep in for years. “Have you tried under the stairs?” he asked.

Polly growled wordlessly but stalked off to check. She wasn’t steady on her feet and her hands were shaking as she tried to work the latch. It took Tommy a pathetically long time to realize she was probably in withdrawal. Stupid of him, he should have remembered this a while ago.

He dug into his pockets and pulled out the small bottle Ada had given him after bringing Polly back to Watery Lane. It was mostly full of small white capsules. “I think this is what you actually want?” he asked.

Polly turned away from the closet, her gaze riveted on the bottle. She took a step forward, then paused. He watched her get suspicious, which was an emotion that had never been directed at him before the war. He always thought he’d get used to it, but somehow, he never had. “So that’s what you’re going to do,” she said. Her tone was quiet but menacing. “Use drugs to control me.”

Tommy kept his whole body still. It was never a good idea to show Polly when her blows landed. “No,” he said. “This is phenobarbital. You can’t just quit something like this; you need to taper off.”

Polly’s lips went tense. She’d always hated it when he knew things she didn’t. “Where did you get those from?”

“Ada gave them to me,” Tommy said. “She searched your bags after you both got here.”

“Of course, she did,” Polly grumbled. She didn’t ask why Ada had given the drugs to Tommy. Tommy was the only person in the family Polly wouldn’t be able to get the drugs away from, and they both knew it. He could tell she hated that knowledge. He figured it wasn’t a good idea to tell her that he hated it too.

Instead of saying something that would probably just further escalate an already tense situation, Tommy opened the bottle and dumped one of the pills into his hand. Then he closed the bottle again and put it back into his pocket before carefully setting the pill on the table and stepping away. “There you go,” he said. “I’m going back to bed.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not going to stay and watch me take it?”

Tommy was just relieved she didn’t mention that he obviously hadn’t been in bed in the first place. “There’s a family meeting tomorrow morning,” he said, brushing by her on his way towards the stairs. “If you do end up finding the booze, don’t take that stuff and drink.”

“I still don’t take orders from you,” she called after him.

He didn’t deign to respond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah…there’s definitely some irony to this chapter given s5.


End file.
